Speculative Politics interrogates how speculative genres address exigent political problems such as climate change and environmental degradation. The session brings together a diverse array of theoretical frameworks—including political theory, environmental humanities, performance studies, and data colonialism—to reimagine political practices and possibilities. This panel is especially timely given the contemporary political unrest that raises questions about government intervention, individual action, collective responsibility, and societal transformation. The papers continue the ongoing work that speculates about humanity and politics, as well as expand existing scholarship that includes analysis of works such as George Orwell’s 1984, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Critical analysis of the topic includes examinations of the ways in which the genre experiments with new ideas about government, envisions the impact politics has on the individual, and explores the interconnectedness between government and the environment. Given the location of MLA 2022 in Washington, DC, this panel’s exploration of the relationship between speculative and political possibilities offers an occasion to reflect on the current state of U.S. politics within a global context of ecological crisis and social unrest. In order to function within the allotted time, the panel will have four 14-minute presentations and 19 minutes of unstructured discussion.

Speculative Politics features four original presentations. "Is the Post in Post-Apocalyptic the Post- in Post-Political?" by Juan Meneses examines the idea of post-politics as a theoretical trope to investigate the limits of the political in a distant future. Meneses analyzes Michael Madsen’s 2010 documentary Into Eternity, arguing that the impossibility of a debate about nuclear energy and its everlasting waste marks the inauguration of a millennial post-political moment that will dictate the kinds of politics that humans will be able to practice in the future. In "Solarpunk Alternatives to Data and Energy Extraction," Christian Fryer-Davis critiques an extractivism paradigm used to separately map the exploitative mechanisms of data and fossil capitalism and demonstrates how the recent speculative genre of solarpunk provides an alternative model of extractivism that recognizes the mutually animating relationship between data and fossil capitalism. Fryer-Davis maintains that solarpunk renegotiates imaginary attachments to normalized forms of extraction and consequently provides necessary hope to resist oppressive political structures.

Doron Darnov, in "Environmental Mourning: The Ecopolitics of Planetary Diaspora," analyses N. K. Jemisin’s short story "Cloud Dragon Skies" and Octavia Butler's novel Parable of the Talents to challenge dominant political discourse on climate change that tends to view environmental mourning as a form of scientific and technological regressivism. Darnov states that these two works suggest that interplanetary migration is a forced diaspora that could have been prevented through proper ecological stewardship to preserve Earth. Darnov argues that these texts embrace an environmental mourning that can help guide contemporary political imaginations toward more sustainable and decolonial approaches to space travel and ecological care. In "Pre-enactment: Performing Political Futures," Teresa Kovacs discusses the speculative mode of "pre-enactments" in works by Swiss director Milo Rau. Kovacs examines theories of the rehearsal together with current reflections on political movements and public gatherings to investigate resonances of political activism and artistic praxis. She argues that rehearsing the future focuses on practicing skills for a future examination of the right to appear in public. Together these presentations bring unique insights to the ways that political science fiction re-casts the world-making aspects of the genre.